I had a migraine yesterday. I don’t know if you’re experienced with migraines, but they’re quite unpleasant. I suppose that’s both obvious and an understatement, but it’s worth saying nonetheless.
Before a migraine hits me, I get something called a migraine aura. In manifests in different ways for different people, but for me, it comes as a jiggly, squiggly hole in my vision. It’s often in the shape of a gash or a slash across my visual field, which is filled with a jittery vision that sort of blends in with the colors that should fit behind it.
Do you know the sort of shapes and colors that appear behind your eyelids, if you close your eyes really hard, or press on them? That’s sort of what it’s like, in the migraine-aura-holes.
I don’t often notice the aura right away, because it can be hard to see at first if I’m not looking for it. I begin to perceive it when I’m doing something that requires me to be able to detect discrete shapes or objects. Most often, this is reading. I can hardly read at all, when I have a migraine aura, because it erases chunks of the words on the page. I had a scary experience with a migraine a few months ago in which I was driving and it erased cars on the road. In retrospect, I should have called someone to give me a ride, but I hadn’t realized how bad it was until I was already driving.
My migraines used to completely take me out of action for hours. Usually, this meant the duration of the day. They are painful. I hesitate to describe the exact degree of the pain they cause, because if I’m honest, I’ve felt things — and born, without much complaint — that brought me much more pain. It’s the location of the pain, in my head and around and beneath my eyes, that seems to disable me. Sometimes it makes my whole body scream at me out of a desire for comfort, if I don’t catch the aura in time.
If I do notice the aura in a timely fashion, and if I medicine for the migraine right away, the physical discomfort is actually negligible. The medications mitigate it enough so that the pain itself becomes bearable. However, I have to take the medicine during the aura time, not after it has faded, and not once the pain has begun. If I wait too long, the medicine has little to no effect.
I took the medicine yesterday during the aura, and so while my eyes ached a bit, the pain itself wasn’t too bad. It’s the other effects of my migraines that make me feel like my day has been taken away. It becomes very difficult to focus on tasks, and I become tired and cranky. I don’t want to move or talk. Thinking becomes slow and difficult.
The pain is gone. I have a bit of a headache, I suppose, but it’s not a migraine. I refer to what I feel the next day as my migraine hangover. Today’s isn’t so bad, but even though I had the exact idea in mind for a story (one featuring Evran, and how he reacts to the events of Abandon) I found myself unable to string the words together to write it out. Nothing felt quite right. The story didn’t flow, and the white blankness of the document has started to make my eyes ache in an echo of what I felt yesterday.
I’m going to save that story for tomorrow, in hopes that if I wait, I’ll be able to get it right. For today, I suppose I’ll just post this.
Daydreams 